Employee Interaction Center: Six Key Learning Points to Consider in an Implementation

by Vinay Naithani, Managing Consultant, HCL-Axon

January 10, 2011

Implementing the Employee Interaction Center (EIC) sometimes requires customized enhancements. With that in mind, use these six field-tested tips to better help you roll out EIC.

Key Concept

Enhancement packages for the Employee Interaction Center (EIC) have made EIC more stable and added new functionality, including the ability to search for related activities for a person, integration with HCM Forms, and additional authorization objects for controlling access. They also add resolution types, which allow agents to classify the kind of response provided while processing and closing an activity. These enhancements improve the analytic nature of the solution.

In my experience in implementing the Employee Interaction Center (EIC), I have come across numerous business requirements that are non-standard. You can fulfill them only through custom developments and enhancements. In this article I will provide you with some of these requirements that your company may find useful.

1. Align Notification Numbers and Activity Numbers

Employees who have a query can submit a request via a self-service link. The self-service link opens an Adobe form in which they can enter details and then submit their request. All such queries submitted through self-services are treated by SAP as Web requests. These Web requests are received by EIC agents in their EIC inbox. The agents can process the Web request and create an activity with a unique activity number.

When employees submit a Web request they receive a notification number for reference purposes. This notification number, however, is not the same as the activity number, which is generated once the Web request is turned into an activity by an EIC agent. Moreover, there is no way you can search an activity in EIC based on the notification number. This can be an issue if an employee refers to the notification number and is not aware of the activity number.

One option to resolve this is to enhance the activity search screen in EIC to allow EIC agents to search an activity using the notification number. This requires custom development and enhancement of the Business Server Page (BSP) application for EIC.

Here's an example of how we achieved this for one of our clients.

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Vinay Naithani

Vinay Naithani is currently working with HCL-Axon as a managing consultant. He has more than seven years of experience working in SAP ERP HCM in areas such as payroll, personnel administration, performance appraisal, enterprise compensation management-recruiting and employee interaction center. He has worked on implementations, global rollouts, and support assignments providing consultancy in SAP ERP HCM. He enjoys learning about new areas of technology and the thrill associated with learning something new every day.